


Ankle-Deep Misery

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Ambiguous Gender Deputy, Fantasizing, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs, Masturbation, Moral Dilemmas, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Other, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-25 16:53:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14981444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: John stares into the darkness, thinking, wondering not for the first time how everything could have gone so wrong.We’re righteous,he thinks.We’re doing the right thing. We’re doing what Joseph’s commanded.---Or; The Deputy forces John to reconsider his definitions of right and wrong, whether he wants to or not.





	Ankle-Deep Misery

**Author's Note:**

> So I received a pretty amazing prompt on my NSFW tumblr:
>
>> anything that combines johns neurosis over being good/bad and another character (dep? idk anyone else) with the endless well of patience and love required to break him of it, and i feel like you’d do him justice
> 
> I had so much fun with this prompt (and kind of want to write a second part tbh) and figured it might be AO3-worthy? At least after some editing lmao
> 
>  
> 
> ~~Pay no mind to the fifty thousand italics. John is full of _EMPHASIS_.~~

The Deputy is a thing to be cleansed. John knows this, the same way his family must know. Sin rests on their shoulders like a pet, content to just sit and be coddled, and the Deputy allows this to happen. They are not pure; they are  _tainted_ , and at this point, it doesn’t matter if John drowns them in the baptismal waters, if he claws word after word into their flesh, only to rip it from them, down to muscle and bone, down to the very  _atoms_  that construct them. 

He’s pondered this for weeks now, and after their escape from the bunker (and  _oh,_  how Deputy Hudson will be  _punished_  for that!), John keeps himself awake, his heart palpitating, his mind searching for how the situation could have gone so  _wrong._  His is a righteous path. It is a path set by  _Joseph,_  who has been nothing but right since he found John. Joseph has laid out the divine future before his family, and aside from a few minor mishaps, it’s all gone to plan. So how,  _how_  could the Deputy have twisted everything so monumentally? How could they throw a wrench into perfect machinery?

 _Hell followed_ , Joseph had intoned.  _Hell_  is apt, because that is what the Deputy leaves behind.

If the Deputy is not stopped, is not  _cleansed,_  then the duty will fall to Jacob or Faith. Joseph will know that John failed.  _It’s Pride,_  John imagines his brother whispering to him, a knife like a precious relic in his hand.  _Pride goeth before the fall. And John, my dear brother, you have fallen quite a distance._

John imagines the burn on his skin, the electric circuitry of P-R-I-D-E; each letter forming a hot current of the agony of purification. He knows the sensation intimately, has held it close to his heart like a prayer. 

And God and Joseph as his witnesses, he  _will_  make the Deputy know that pain.

\- - -

His chance comes one black night, when the moon turns its face away from earth and leaves only a cold shadow. Holland Valley is swallowed by this darkness, but John feels as though the brightest ray of sunlight is falling upon him.  _Providence,_ at  _last._  

The Deputy is his after a lengthy altercation. There was a great deal of shooting on a ridge overlooking some out of the way rest area. Sparks of gunpowder lit the air like fireflies, and the smell of burning saltpeter turned the air acrid. But John had breathed it in like holy incense, relishing in its sting. There had been a shout about a hundred yards up the ridge, and then one of his men had brought down the unconscious body of the Deputy. They were limp and lifeless over the man’s shoulder. When they were dropped down at John’s feet, it was an offering that any saint would have rejoiced over. 

Now he watches them with interest, this God-given gift. Here, in a boathouse, under sickly yellow light, they look the type of the martyr. Beaten, bruised, bloody. It’s all so  _beautiful._  He wishes he could capture the image forever, but an icon is not meant to be worshiped. His fingers feel as if they are tipped in static for his need to touch, to  _mar_  them, to carve a saint out of the bones of a sinner the way he knows he can. 

When they wake, he wishes he could swallow the very breath they gasp out. 

He’s gotten wiser this time. Joseph would be proud (and God, does he  _hope_  he would), with how securely they’re bound to the chair. They’re bound in straps and cables, held in place by knots of an expert hand. Even if they were to try what they did in the bunker and escape while still in the chair, the only way they could fall is into the water, and then the cleansing waters  _will_  steal their life away. John wants to laugh at the poetic beauty of it all. The only thing he hasn’t bound is their mouth, because he wants to hear the sounds of their Atonement as he carves it into them, as he pulls their Confession from their very ribs, scream by scream. 

They peer up at him with bruised eyes, wide and frightened and wondering. 

“Oh, Deputy,” John says slowly, walking around their chair in order to see them at every angle. He smiles, watching their fingers twitch, the muscles in their arms jump. “You won’t get very far this time. I won’t even offer an apology for that, as our last meeting was so rudely interrupted by your  _selfishness.”_

It  _had_  been selfish. To leave behind his gifts, their own chance at being cleansed! 

Although, to be fair, they had so readily volunteered. They had said  _Yes_ , even when the words trembled on their lips, and their eyes had locked on Hudson as if she were the only reason for the cause. No matter.  _Yes_  was the operative word.

He reaches out, brushing some of the hair away from the Deputy’s face. They stay still, eyes following his hand, only to flit back to his face. “I’ll be gentle,” he promises. “I won’t forget that you said Yes. You do remember that, don’t you?”

They stay silent, but their eyes tell them all he needs to know.

Yes.

_Yes._

His smile grows. His hands brush over their hair the way a parent might comfort a child.  _Might,_ because John has only ever known hands that meant to harm. He will show the Deputy something different. He will show them the hands of one under the power of the Father who will not harm his Child, no matter how far they’ve fallen from the potential of grace.

“You still have a chance,” John murmurs to them. He leans in so he can smell them. They smell like gunpowder, sweat, and blood. He can smell  _Wrath,_ the burning scent of war and death, and it just confirms what he’s known all along. “You can atone here, in this place, and finally find the peace you’re searching for. That  _thing_  you hunt, that you pretend that you’ll find in the carcasses of those you’ve killed?” He laughs, reaching up and running a thumb along their cheekbone, smearing a rust-red streak of blood. “You call it peace, but you won’t find it out there.”

He stands up, lifting his thumb to his mouth to lick the blood away. It may be the Deputy’s, or it may be one of his own Followers. It doesn’t matter, especially in comparison to the wide-eyed stare the Deputy gives him, like they’re trying to decide if he’s the manifestation of a dream or not.

He turns away, walking toward a rusting yellow toolbox, full of fishing tackle and random bits of hardware. But the object of his pursuit is a red-handled fishing knife, the blade like a gentle swoop of metal, meant to slice away scales and open the bellies of cold, dead-eyed creatures. He takes it with a flourish, switching it from his right hand to his left and back again. When he turns around to face the Deputy, their eyes fall to the knife. 

“I’ll give you a moment to consider your Confession,” John says. He gives them a smile like he might have given when he was a lawyer. It’s an almost sickening expression, all charisma and calmness.  _I’m here to assuage your fears and anxieties,_  it says.  _I’m here to tell you that you will succeed, no matter the obstacles._

But the Deputy just keeps staring, rather like they’re judging  _him_. 

“I don’t have to,” they say at last.

John almost falters.  _Almost._  

“Come again?” 

He sees a shift in their shoulders; a shrug bound in bungee cord and duct tape. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought a confession was something I had to choose to do,” the Deputy says, as casual as they can. It’s as if they’re discussing the point over dinner. “I know that by your estimation, I’ve sinned. But any church can tell me I’ve sinned and it won’t matter unless I come to them willingly with a confession prepared.”

John grips the handle of the knife tighter, but his smile stays fixed. “And haven’t you? You were on that ridge, after all. You’ve repeatedly come into my territory with your sins bared.”

Another shrug. “You could say that, but it wouldn’t be true,” they parry. John hates how calm they sound. His fingers itch to slice silence into their throat. If they sense danger radiating from him, they resolutely refuse to acknowledge it. “Confession wasn’t my intent. I mean, if Holland Valley is your… I don’t know,  _divine dominion,_  or whatever you’d call it? Hell, you can sin  _in_  a church if you want to. I could commit adultery, worship false idols, disobey my family, and it wouldn’t matter unless I came to you explicitly and said that I wanted to confess. Right?”

He doesn’t confirm their question. He doesn’t, because it’s  _wrong._  They are a sinner and they’ve fallen into his hands, and it’s his ordained job to rid them of the cancerous  _thing_  inside of them, by whatever means necessary.

John grits his teeth, and his smile turns into something more predatory. He gets up close to them, the blade of the fishing knife hovering just over their chest. He can see the even beats of their heart through their shirt. “You  _will_  confess,” he promises. “I’ve told you that before, and I’ll say it again. Your sins are a black mark upon your soul, and you will say  _Yes_  a hundred times more until each sin is scoured from you.”

“Then that’s a threat, and not a confession. Kind of one-sided, John,” the Deputy replies. It seems as if John was holding a chainsaw to their neck, they would say the same thing. Then, their brows furrow in something that bares a close resemblance to pity. “Just because you were taught one kind of lesson doesn’t mean that the same lesson applies to everyone. Or that the lesson was right in the first place.”

He almost stabs them then and there.

Instead, he’s in their space, blade pressed up against their neck. He hisses in their face, watching their eyes dart about, trying to find one thing to focus on. The blade nicks them, and a tiny droplet of blood snakes down their neck until it soaks into the collar of their shirt. They don’t flinch. “I have given you time, and I have given you the very  _extent_  of my patience. Like it or not, you  _will_  confess. You will give me every last  _syllable_  of your sins, and you will mean it all down to the last  _word.”_

The two of them are silent, save for their breathing. John’s is heavy and rushed through his lips, while the Deputy breaths slowly through their nose. Their scent is a tangible weight upon him, marking them, and John wants to–

 _Damnit._  He wants to–

The sharp  _ping!_  of a bullet hitting corrugated steel brings him out of his trance, biting through the red haze of his anger. There are shouts on the other side of the boathouse’s walls, and John stands up straight, snarling in frustration. He picks up the radio from beside a workbench. “ _What_  is going on out there?”

The transmission is garbled at first; just unintelligible shouts through static. “ _It’s– Resistance forces– coming through the–”_ The radio cuts out there with another sharp tattoo of gunfire, some of it hitting the boathouse like hail. 

In fury, John rounds on the Deputy who doesn’t seem perturbed. They smile like a saint standing among the condemned. “Jess was up there on the ridge,” they explain. “No one caught her.”

Jess Black. The Huntress. He can imagine her going through the underbrush, as silent as a cat, following the capture party to the boathouse before radioing for backup.

John wants to rip the woman apart with his bare hands, or save her for whatever Jacob wishes to inflict.

Then, the Deputy  _laughs._  They tap their feet against the cracked concrete floor and smile at him like they’ve shared a joke. “I’d start running, John,” they say. “Jess has got it out for you, and she’s probably going to have to wait in line behind the people she’s called.”

He looks between the door and the black water of the boathouse port, leading out to a dark forest and at least five hundred yards in a freezing current to anything resembling civilization. On the other side of the door is a dead contingent of his people, and what is probably a living wall of angry Resistance. John is proud of what he has and what he’s done, but he hasn’t come this far due in part to any idiocy. He knows when a situation has gone sour.

John swears,  _loudly._

He brandishes the knife at the Deputy one more time. “This isn’t over,” he hisses. “You know it isn’t.”

Pity again. He wants to cut the look from their face like the scales from a fish. He  _hates_  it.

“I know,” they say.

Something metallic buckles against the door, and John turns in time to see the hinges struggle against whatever’s impacted it. He grimaces and throws the knife aside before jumping into the water. The cold steals his breath, but he steels himself against it and kicks off the algae-coated stone below him. 

While he swims away, he can still hear the Deputy’s laughter in his head.

\- - -

Joseph finds out about the failed Confession within the day. He doesn’t pay a visit to John, but his words from a phone call are enough to haunt John. They follow him into his restless sleep, and what he dreams he manages to have are full of the disappointed stare of his brother, the flash of anger hidden behind amber lenses.

“ _Your sin blinded you, brother,”_ these phantoms of Joseph whisper. In the dreams, cold hands cover John’s eyes and his mouth, keeping him from confessing in desperation. “ _You have allowed yourself to be consumed by that which you’ve sworn to atone for. I expected better, John.”_

More voices fill the black void hidden in those hands. “ _Sin is born and festers in idleness,”_ says his mother. “ _Confess! You know what you’ve done!”_  says his father.

John feels the searing of sin into his flesh.  _Pride_  for expecting it to go well, that a meager company of people could contain the Deputy.  _Wrath_  for his unchecked anger.  _Sloth_  for failing to stop the Deputy and the Resistance. And  _Lust_ for–

He opens his eyes, met with the same cold darkness of his bedroom at the Ranch. His chest is heaving, sweat a cold sheen on his skin. The stinging of atonement is absent, merely a phantom pain. 

The yawning emptiness it leaves behind, however, is very real. 

John stares into the darkness, thinking, wondering not for the first time how everything could have gone so wrong.  _We’re righteous,_  he thinks.  _We’re doing the right thing. We’re doing what Joseph’s commanded._

But he thinks of the Deputy, and how things have been going so right for them as well. It makes him remember of one of Joseph’s lessons, after he had seared  _PRIDE_ into John’s flesh the first time. Joseph had pressed his forehead against John’s, his breathing so calm and slow, his hands on John’s shoulders as blood stained his fingers.

John says now what Joseph said then, “God will not strike down the righteous and good. He will allow some sacrifice, but He will never take the lives of those whose cause is just.”

 _Some_  sacrifice. John thinks about the piles of bodies smoldering in mass burn pits and rotting in graves of dozens. Each and every Follower was given a similar lesson about their cause. Each believed that God and Joseph would protect them, because they were all meant to reach Eden’s Gate together.

But God has spared the Deputy and their people as well, and they’re the antithesis of Joseph’s mission.

The void’s edges are cracked like broken glass, and John strays away from it as much as he can.

He hardly notices his hand travelling downwards until he feels his own fingers slip beneath the waistband of his boxers, reaching up to grasp his cock with his thumb sliding up over the head. Lust has been one sin that he can’t quite shake, and he feels it commingling with his Wrath, his Greed, his Sloth, his Pride. It takes the form of the Deputy, as beautiful as the image of the Devil is supposed to be. He sees them in his mind’s eye, as sinful and tainted as they can be, but with this halo of righteous light, this corona of  _goodness_  and  _mercy._  Hell takes on the shades of Heaven, wears it like a mask, and kisses John’s skin with it.

His hand trembles on his cock, but he strokes himself regardless, eyes rolling back in his head.

He imagines the Deputy’s hand on him, their strokes slow and methodical. Their lips press with the weight of a shadow on his shoulders, his neck, his jaw. They whisper terrible,  _evil_  things into his ears. The unspeakable fills his head as they work him closer and closer to the precipice of something flawed and filthy; to the absolution of wickedness realized.

They are Legion personified, but instead of swine, they press the demons into John’s flesh. Their words are an incantation, an act of witchcraft, a forbidden thing that John cannot fight. Their tongue draws symbols of darkness on his skin while their fingers press a tight ring around his cock, a mimic of things to come. They kiss their way down his body, leaving trails of cold hellfire down his skin. Then, they consume him like the flames of the ungodly, their mouth forming a seal over his cock, swallowing him down like a libation.

He moans into the darkness, writhing and arching off the bed. 

John is an open receptacle for the devilry they give him. He is wide open and vulnerable; he is spread out before them, ready and waiting. “ _Yes,”_ he whispers to them, to this phantasm of corruption and death. “Fuck, yes.”

The Deputy licks him obscenely, sucks him off, uses their hands in some form of dark art to coax him closer and closer to that cliff.  _You would jump for me,_  they whisper, their voice low like the growl of a demon. His precum is a shine on their bottom lip, under fangs set in a wide grin.

He nods, desperate. “Yes,  _yes._  Oh God, I’d–”

God’s name in vain. They laugh and take him into their mouth, into their  _throat_ , soft and warm muscles fluttering against his length. They hum and moan and it’s all hellish music in his ears. The song is played louder and louder through the circuitry of his veins and capillaries, deafening when it reaches his arteries and plunges like a blade into his heart.

He comes harder than he’s ever come in his life, his mind going white as he teeters over the edge.  _And the herd, numbering two or three thousand, plunged into the sea_ , he thinks, and hysterical laughter sparks like fire from flint in his chest. For a moment more, he thinks he sees the Deputy, crowned in starlight, smiling beatifically at him from the end of his bed. They are beautiful and clean and  _perfect,_  and they’re gone in a blink of an eye. John is left alone in the dark room, his spend rapidly cooling on his hand and his stomach, patches of it cold and wet on the fabric of his boxers.

He feels stunned and hollowed out. He feels all those holes he had spent years attempting to fill, all reopened and emptied of their useless weight of cargo. 

“God will not strike down the righteous and good,” he whispers again, clinging to each word. “He will not…”

The Deputy has never been struck down, but John has. 

Silence. There is only the soft hiss of the air conditioner and the faint rattle of the wind against the walls.

“Fuck,” he whispers to nothing at all.

\- - -

A radio call comes the next afternoon, as John sits on the balcony of the hangar. The wind bends the tops of the pines in the distance, and he watches them with eyes still heavy and gritty with exhaustion. Sleep evaded him for the better part of the night, and when it managed to succeed, his dreams replaced Joseph with the Deputy, and became too complicated to rest through.

A soft electric chirp draws him out of his haze, and he barely musters the strength to give the go ahead to the other party. He half expects it to be Joseph, threatening arrival and inevitable chastisement. John has already gotten a bottle of hydrogen peroxide ready for what he knows must be coming.

“ _John?”_

The voice of the Deputy is almost enough to make John drop the entire contraption. He fumbles with the speaker, adrenaline hitting him right where he needs it. However, the radio chirps again before he can reply.

“ _Hey, I don’t even know if you can hear me right now. I’m just kind of taking a chance here, but…”_ They trail off, hesitant. John wants to encourage them to speak, but doesn’t want to risk interrupting them. The memories of last night are too fresh. He wants to savor every word that comes from their body. “ _I think I’m… I’m ready to confess._ ”

Silence.

_Chirp._

“I think both of us are ready to confess, Deputy” says John. His words jump out before he can reign them in. “Somewhere a little more secluded, though.”

He can almost picture them smiling, saintlike,  _lovely._

“ _Yeah,_ ” they reply. “ _I’d like that. Confessions are meant to be private, after all._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://radiojamming.tumblr.com)   
>  [NSFW Tumblr](http://darkworkcourier.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> Title comes from 16 Horsepower's 'Hutterite Mile': "It's only misery, it's only ankle-deep."


End file.
